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Indian author from New York, Mangalore, and elsewhere. Many of my books, such as The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel, Impressing the Whites, and The Killing of an Author use humor and satire to make serious points. Only my books speak for me; blogs are impulsive, often un-edited exercises in free expression: a symbolic resistance to being silenced by the Establishment.

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Why Uncompromising Writers Need Your Protection

As a matter of principle, it is important to preserve uncompromising writers like me, because as Tom Hayden says in How to Save the World (a quote I picked up on the Internet): “You can’t break the cycle of poverty; you can’t break the cycle of violence; you can’t break the cycle of corporate expansion; you can’t break the cycle of the arms race; you can’t break the cycle of imprisonment, if you don’t break the cycle by which radicals are isolated, idealists are turned into pragmatists, and pragmatists into opportunists.” Isolated, fatwahed, starved, and broken. Yes, you need to protect the writers who would, as Bill Clinton said of Bob Dylan, disturb the peace and discomfort the powerful.

The Killing of an Author also contains this appeal to Sonny Mehta, President of Knopf, who had praised my novel "The Revised Kama Sutra" in glowing terms, and according to Harriet Wasserman, had offered to publish it, and then withdrawn his offer the next day and asked for more time--then stalled for more than a year:

I appeal to your idealism, to the fact that we are on this planet for a very brief span, and ultimately none of the petty misunderstandings will matter, but that the good deeds we have done will probably linger: What are you on this earth for if you can't stand for something you believe in, especially when you are possibly the only person with the power and the vision to stand for it?

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